Need Help with System

[PaulNEPats]

Hey everyone

I just purchased some parts to upgrade my PC system. Here's the specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
1 Gigabyte Corsair XMS PC3200 Memory
Antec Mid Tower Sonata w/provided 380W PS
NVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600
Western Digital 60 Gig HD 2mb Cache
MSI Neo Platinum Motherboard

My main concern is the hard drive. I've heard that 8mb is a lot better than 2mb cache, but is it worth shelling out the extra 80 bucks for it? Also, before I was using an Athlon XP 2000+ CPU. How much of a noticable performance increase can I expect with the AMD 64 3000+ chip?

Anything you guys can offer to increase the overall performance of my PC will be appreciated!

Thanks!
Paul

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by PaulNEPats on 07/14/04 07:29 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Cybercraig]

$80.00? For 8mb over 2mb? Get a Samsung with 8mb cache and don't look back.


Abit IS7 - 2.8C @ 3.30 - Mushkin PC4000 (2 X 512) - Sapphire 9800Pro - TT 420 watt Pure Power
Samsung 120gb ATA-100 - Maxtor 40gb ATA - 100
Sony DRU-510A - THAT'S MORE LIKE IT, MSI!

 

[endyen]

I think he means $80 for a new drive. I'm not too fond of the WD 2 meg jobs, the first 6 Ibought all went south in a few months, then all the rma returns failed. Maybe bad luck. Now I just use the 8 meg drives bothe WD and Seagate. No problems there.

 

[TheRod]

Better HDD will gives better loading time! But once, you will be in a game, your HDD (even with onle 2 Megs of cache) will not affect your performance. And since you have 1Gig of RAM, your system should not "SWAP" too much!

Of course, if you have money to spend a 8Megs HDD is not a bad thing to buy!

--
It's tricky to use words like <b><font color=green>AMD</font color=green></b> or <b><font color=blue>Intel</font color=blue></b> in a signature some users could think your are biased.

 

[Zoron]

Not to mention a 3-year warranty. Other than the performance, that is the best thing about buying the 8MB cache versions of WD hard drives.

<font color=red> If you design software that is fool-proof, only a fool will want to use it. </font color=red>

 

[davemar14]

I got a WD 80 GB w/8 MB, and I can really tell the performance of that, and my WD 40 GB w/2 MB. The performance really shows in games, and large files.